The Future of Beauty (brochure, A4)

The Future

of

Beauty

(c) 2020 by James Banks, licensed nnder a Creative
Commons license: Attribntion-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International. Yon may make
and distribnte copies of this work, withont
modification, for non-commercial pnrposes. For fnll
terms of license, see

creativecommons. org / licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

V. 0.2, 2 November 2020
My website is 10v24.net

The type nsed is Donald Knnth’s Compnter
Modern Serif.

I remember in high school we were giving reports
on onr personal heritages. I remember that Qasim
got np right before I did. He talked abont how his
family came fleeing the violence in Somalia, and
abont their past in the generations before that. I
got np and gave my report. In my research, I had
discovered many different threads to follow, whether
my Irish ancestors or my wealthy English ancestors,
bnt I chose to talk abont one family name that
came down my mom’s side of the family. It was a
Hngnenot name, Protestants who lived in France
and fled to other lands. This was back in the days
when people killed each other over religion. The
Hngnenots in my family moved hrst to the
Netherlands, then to England, then to America,
which is where onr family came from to come to
here.

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31

remembered, from when I was in kindergarten.
Finally, we were more settled in onr sadness. And
Bopha’s mom said, “Okay. Yon have snffered
enongh. Fm going to make yon some snacks and
bring something to show yon.” We sat in her living
room, Kamaria on the carpet and me on the couch
where Bopha’s mom had sat. And we waited
quietly, with nothing to say.

Bopha’s mom came back with some little snacks,
and then said, “Fll be back soon.” She went off
down the hallway that led to all the bedrooms,
opened a door we could not see, and then soon
enough returned... with Bopha. We could not
believe what we were seeing, but since we were
unacquainted with death, we were ready to believe
anything. “Hello.” she said quietly. “You thought I
died, didn’t you?”

We looked at her quietly and felt something we had
never felt before, a sadness at joy. We were going
to get excited that she was back, but instead we felt
a quiet feeling like mourning. The value that we
felt for her was more important than our
excitement. And she knew her value to us from
that, even supposing she hadn’t heard our words
about her, through the thin walls of the house.

30

THE FUTURE OF BEAUTY

These are sketches of the way the future might be,
or will be.

The character Bopha’s name is pronounced “boh
pah”. Chanthavy’s name is pronounced “chan ta
vy”. Ngoc’s name is pronounced “nowp”, but you
close down on the “p” instead of expelling air
afterward as you usually do after a “p” in English.
If curious, you might look up the pronunciations of
other names in these short stories.

3

PART 1

4

laughing so hard. And then Bopha took her hand
from mine (only our hngers had been touching) and
did her own twirl, and lost balance, and fell off the
ledge, screaming. We could see her fall and then
saw her body break far below us, her voice cut
short.

We had no idea what to do. What would we do?

We had read about death in books, but we forgot
everything we had read. Would we be in trouble?
We thought of how we had participated in what
had happened. But we thought that we should tell
her parents. So we ran back up the path to the
edge of the wilderness and untied our horses where
we’d left them, and rode back to our neighborhood,
Bopha’s horse following its friends, and tied up the
horses outside Bopha’s house. We rang the doorbell
and Bopha’s mom opened the door. “Children, has
something bad happened?” “We were out at the
precipice, and Bopha fell off and I think she died,”
Kamaria said. We were scared and upset. “Oh
children,” said Bopha’s mom, “I’m so sorry.” And
she comforted us as we grieved.

We talked about what Bopha had meant to us, for
a while, and Bopha’s mom shared some stories of
how she was as a little girl. Some of them I

29

was like him. We had a conversation, and at the
end of it, my parents said, “Maybe that’s jnst the
way he is.”

I remember one time in middle school, Bopha fell
from a precipice. Bopha and Kamaria and I were
walking home from school when Kamaria said,

“Hey, let’s go look at the precipice.” We were all
excited, having read the word “precipice” on the
sign to the path, never having had mnch interest
before, bnt that day we had read in onr langnage
arts class abont a noble poet who stood proudly
above the precipice. We thought there would be a
beautiful view down into the gorge or valley below.

We walked and even ran a little down the path to
the precipice, and then we came to it. We loved the
sight. We saw cattle grazing far below us, and the
shelf-like edges of the precipice asserted themselves.
We all got very close to the edge, ignoring any fear,
and Bopha, egged on by Kamaria and me, started
to walk on a narrow shelf, beaming and smiling. I
reached down and took her hand and suggested
imperatively that she dance. We were having a
good time, my hand in hers and Kamaria was

“What a truly consensual day,” said Vinay to Hazel
and Midori. They agreed. The wind was blowing,
in a way that fully respected each of the people it
blew on. The sky had little clouds that were
moving in a way which reassured each of the three
young people, clouds that knew where they were
headed to. The young people walked along a street
with beautiful sighing trees; these trees were tall,
maybe 60 feet tall, conifers. They kicked the cones
at their feet and spoke of what they were going to
do next. They walked by the shadow of a giant
windmill of glory, they looked up at the arms of it,
seeing the sun shine through. They each stood still
to absorb the moment. They would remember that
moment, even the angle of the arms, for the rest of
their lives.

Lech, Aster, Tamar, and Fabrizio sat at the bar,
with its classily-wiped shiny bartop, its gorgeous
low key saxophone and piano and hushing drumkit
trio in one corner, three musicians who were
thoroughly absorbed in music and in chilling out.
“The vibe in here is amazing,” said Fabrizio. “I
know!” rejoined Aster. “The only thing that could
make it better would be if...”

28

5

Everyone knew what she was abont to say, and the
AI made it manifest. The bartender, a beantifnl
man, made a signal, and a stately woman in a linen
robe came in, taking her time, not saying a word.
She made gestnres of invitation and initiation, not
saying a word, and the adventnrers looked at her,
their hearts waiting. She took ont a wooden box,
and opened it np, and removed an ornate atomizer,
rich with tastefnl decorations, with a bnlb wrapped
in cloth woven two-colors-against-each-other. Then
she took ont of the box two small phials of colored
liqnid and a larger bottle of a clear liqnid. She
opened the atomizer and pnt a few drops from the
small phials in the atomizer, then hlled it np with
liqnid from the bottle. She shook the atomizer.
Then she pointed it toward the ceiling and sprayed
a fragrant clond.

“Wow.” said Lech. He didn’t have mnch else to say
in the moment, and neither did anyone else.

They came back to being able to speak.

“It reminded me of the beach,” said Tamar. “An
afternoon at the beach, with an onshore breeze.
Being 8 years old.”

When we got older, we moved on to the middle
school, and we rode onr horses in to the city. We
rode past the great big windmill which reached ont
to the sky, and in the mornings it was cold, so we
made the horses go faster so that they wonld be
warmer. I used to like to sit in the back of class
near the heater in the morning. My mind was so
fresh.

Bopha and Kamaria and I used to eat lunch
together, but we were the only ones we knew from
our elementary school to end up at the same middle
school. But we were pretty sure that everyone we
knew would go to the same high school. And on
the weekends, when our homework was done, we
would go looking around for Amraz, who wasn’t in
school, but who wandered around looking for stray
animals to take back to his uncle, who paid him two
dollars for each stray animal. His uncle had
animals grazing out in the wilderness, and some of
them wandered into town. After he was done
Ending animals, Amraz would go to the arcade and
play video games for a few hours and then go out
again and do nothing at all.

I asked my parents one time about Amraz. Why
was he the way he was? It seemed like no one else

6

27

“People used to want to feel different, so they would
put different things in their bodies.”

“Like food?”

“Kind of like food. These things they put in
themselves made them feel good and they relied on
them a lot. I think in the story he takes it so he
can think better.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Why does Sherlock Holmes
use cocaine? Isn’t he really smart without it?”

“It’s hard to be smart. Maybe he was under a lot of
pressure to be the kind of person he thought he was
supposed to be. Sometimes people would have high
expectations for other people, which made the other
people push themselves. Other times, people would
have high expectations for reality. They wanted
something deep and true in the very moments they
lived. So they would chase the intensity.

Sometimes I feel like that’s what Sherlock Holmes
was going for.” And again, he was sadder when
saying this than I felt in hrst hearing it.

“I second that,” said Aster, “But I would also add
that it’s the day after my birthday and I’m
remembering how much fun I had.”

Lech didn’t have anything to say. “I don’t know
what this brings up for me, but I feel it.”

Fabrizio said “I’m thinking of a friend of mine, the
way he smiles.”

The adventurers talked about past adventures, of
delicious food they had eaten, food that tasted like
the color of mahogany wood and the warmth of a
camphre. They talked about crossing the grand
canal in order to get to the cotton helds, where they
had picked cotton (the easiest thing in the world,
like cutting butter with a knife) and wove clothes
for themselves on looms they found in cool halls, in
buildings which were set aside for the purpose.

And then their perfumer prepared another scent,
and they were taken to a garden in which there
were cool walkways and roses out in the sun, and
the day was hot but the adventurers were glad to
be in the heat, after having been not too long but
just long enough in a cool-morninged house. And

26

7

they were going to experience a third scent-clond,
bnt Tamar said that she had to step ontside while
they did that. “Is there something wrong?” they
asked.

“Oh no, it’s jnst that all this perfnme can make it
difficult for me to form sentences. It’s too beautiful
for me.”

The others understood. “Okay, maybe another
time!” and they continued to savor the perfection
which the perfumer offered without stint.

Tamar stood outside, meanwhile, until Ngoc and
Juan Carlos approached. She waved at her friends
in the bar and they waved back, and she went off
with Ngoc and Juan Carlos.

They found three horses tied up by a fountain. The
horses were proud and noble, and the three used
what they knew about horsemanship (learned from
an afternoon of the closest attention) and mounted
the steeds.

They rode through the city, through the wide
boulevards, the main part of the streets empty, but
the sidewalks well-populated, and people were

8

rope.” So Bopha and I moved the rope, and Lauren
and Kamaria jumped.

I used to like to read when I was your age. My
parents had a bunch of books and I would ask them
what they were about. “What is Madame Bovary
about?”

“It’s about a woman who has nothing to do, and
then she goes off to have a relationship with some
men who are not her husband. In the end, she kills
herself.”

I felt sad and confused when I heard that. “Did
that really happen?”

“The story is a novel, but that was the kind of life
people used to lead.” I felt a little bit sad when I
heard that, but my parents looked like they were
even sadder.

One time I was reading a Sherlock Holmes book
and I asked my dad about it. “What’s cocaine?”

25

walking in the rain. Bnt first I have to ask my
parents.” And they said that we conld, bnt we
wonld have to leave onr shoes on the porch instead
of pntting them on the tile in the entryway. (They
said this thinking we wonld bring in mnd, which
was a wise prediction.) So we went ont on the
sidewalk ont to the end of the neighborhood where
there was some nndeveloped land. And as we set
out, she said “We have to be careful not to step on
the snails. When we get out to the forest” (the
undeveloped land, with towering 12-foot-high
bushes) “we can’t lose each other, we always have to
be in sight of each other.”

One time Kamaria and Bopha were playing jump
rope and wanted me to play with them. I was not
feeling like playing jump rope, but I wasn’t feeling
like not playing jump rope either, and they were
feeling like playing jump rope, so I played jump
rope. They gave me a doll to hold. “Lauren needs
to exercise, so you have to hold her and do the
jump rope.” I got really tired doing this and I said,
“I can’t do it anymore. I’m getting tired.” and they
said, “OK, you can take a rest.” And Kamaria said
“I can hold Lauren now, and you can hold the jump

looking at them go by. Tamar knew that she was
queen, and that Ngoc and Juan Carlos were her
inner advisers, and they knew that as well and were
fully in accord with her. They galloped to the
center of the city, to the great square, where there
were other horses and riders, and they all trotted
around each other, partnering up for equestrian
dancing. The AI caused trees to grow up over the
horses and riders when they tired, and the riders
dismounted, and the horses walked away, and the
riders introduced each other to each other,
something which was impossible during the
equestrian dances. Ngoc, Juan Carlos, and Tamar
found themselves introducing themselves to
Katrine, Nigel, and someone named 16. “It’s
spelled one six, sixteen.” They decided to go over
to a restaurant and have dinner, an early dinner on
a clear summer’s day, after all their bracing
horseback riding.

Ngoc, Billingara, and Tamar found each other
outside the Grand Library. They walked around
the colonnades, looking at the bas reliefs of
legendary writers, like Sir Ronald Moore and
Wisteria van Helft. They wondered what to do.

24

9

Ngoc suggested that they go down to Smuggler’s
Pond. The others agreed. They set out from the
Grand Library and went walking for many hours
out into the hills around the city.

Finally, they came to a stream running down into a
hole in the ground. The hole was signihcantly
larger than the stream. There was a rope leading
down into the hole, and our three adventurers let
themselves down into the darkness of a karst cave
system.

Their feet were sure on the yet damp limestone, and
they had with them flashlights by which they
illuminated their surroundings. They found
themselves in a boxy room, where lying on the
ground was a pile of treasure! They looked through
the treasure, looked at the inscriptions on beautiful
coins, and then put everything back.

Then they continued on and found a tight
passageway which they got through, with both a
sense of adventure and the certainty that they
would get through it, and they arrived in a
catacomb, complete with human bones.

I remember one time it was raining and I was over
at Bopha’s house. Her parents were in the other
room talking and, later on, making dinner. So we
had the whole afternoon just to sit in the living
room playing with toys. It was going okay for a
while, but then we started to get irritated at each
other, and she started to get mad at me, and she
yelled at me to give her back her toys and go home.
And I didn’t want to go out in the rain and get wet
on the way back home and she started yelling some
more. And her parents came in, and she looked at
her parents and yelled at them too. And they came
up to her and sadly said, “Bopha, dear lass, come
sit with us on the couch.” And she stopped yelling
and sat with them on their couch. “Bopha, you
have played very much this afternoon.” “Yes,
Bopha,” said her mom, “You have played a lot with
your friend.” Bopha was quieter. “Bopha, your
friend is very hurt. Do you see how he cries?” And
I was crying, and she looked up at me and said that
I was crying. “OK, Bopha, now you see him,” her
mom said, and they got up and went back to
making dinner in the kitchen. And Bopha sat on
the couch for a little bit composing herself, and I
sat on the carpet composing myself. And then she
got up and put the toys away and said, “I have an
umbrella and you can have one, too. We can go

10

23

surveyed what was there. Amraz looked at the
corpses of the enemy pilots and decided that we
should have a funeral for them. So we got our guns
out again and hred them off into the air above the
playground, to honor each of the pilots we had
killed. Then we gathered stones for them and built
cairns over their graves. Wouldn’t the playground
attendants move the cairns? We tried to tell them
not to move them, but they said to us, “We honor
the dead as much as you do, but we don’t want
anyone to trip on them. We have to care about the
living, too.”

When I was younger, some of the kids I played with
were named Amraz, Bopha, and Qasim. Amraz
had red hair and blue eyes. Bopha had different
eyes, kind of slanted, and she had black hair.

Qasim had a round face and dark brown skin and
hair. Sometimes I played with Bopha’s friends, too,
like Kamaria and Chanthavy. Amraz would come
and play with them when I was playing with them,
but he did his own thing sometimes, too.

They saw ancient inscriptions, which they were able
to interpret after just the right amount of effort.
They thought about the past, about all the
dynasties which must have existed to produce the
things that they saw.

Then they moved on. “Where’s Smuggler’s Pond?”
asked Billingara. “I don’t know,” replied Ngoc.
“Okay, we’ll hnd it sometime or other.”

They kept looking through the cave system. They
found a room with amazing stalagmites and
stalactites. The room had a light pink look to it,
from its minerals. They found an underground
waterfall, which roared from far away. They sat in
the dark, and inhabited a moment of simply
hearing.

They didn’t feel like going any further down the
waterfall, so they turned back and took a different
branch. They could hear the sound of a guitar
playing. “I bet that’s it,” said Tamar. They came
out of the passage onto the shore of an underground
pond. There were young people playing guitar and
sitting around. Some of them were playing with the
water, splashing and idly leaving their hands in.

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11

Little cave creatures climbed up out of the pond
and then ran away from the light, except for the
blind cave creatures, which came to sit next to the
guitar player. The guitar player was singing a
beautiful song. Everything else, except for the
splashing of hands in water and the skittering of the
cave creatures, was silent, everyone was quiet.

Ngoc, Tamar, and Billingara silently got out the
sandwiches they had brought with them, and tasted
their watercress and provolone cheese, which was
simple food, but especially welcome after their
exertions in the dark.

Ngoc, Billingara and Juan Carlos could smell
something they couldn’t put their minds to
understand, something spicy and strong, and they
followed their noses outside to see a whole festival
of flower-sellers, marching through the streets and
setting up their stalls. The flower-sellers were
singing in their sopranos and altos, songs that
skipped and echoed, interlocking parts that were
improvised according to an old tradition. The
flowers were not the source of the smell, though,
and the three adventurers walked on through.

These are some things that I remember. I have
written them down so that you can see what my life
was like for me when I was your age.

“Why do children laugh but adults never laugh?”

“Laughing is good for you when you’re young but it
is better for adults not to laugh. We need to watch
our hearts, because adults are capable of great evil.”

I remember back when I was younger, younger than
you are, flying high above the playground with my
arms out as wings, running around on the
decomposed granite of the playground, hring my
machine guns at Amraz, until he joined my
squadron and we fought the enemy that was always
available to us as soon as it was time for us to hght.
Several of the other boys were attracted to the
action, including Qasim and August. We swooped
past the enemy and scored several casualties. Then
some of the girls entered the fray. We thought they
were our enemies at hrst until we realized they were
on our side. We flew around for a while, but then
time and life told us that this pursuit needed to be
laid aside, and we landed on the ground and

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21

PART 2

several streets down, never losing the trace of the

smell.

Eventnally they came ont into a plaza where there
was a herd of nnicorns. The nnicorns had a sweet
smell, the smell of blessed pastnres, bnt this was
not the smell that had spoken so persnasively to
onr adventnrers back inside.

They continned several streets farther and at last
came to a table where was laid cheese and bread
and wine and olives and pineapples and lotns
blossoms and artichoke hearts. They began to eat
the food, bnt as they ate realized that they conld
no longer smell the fragrance that had called them,
bnt conld only smell the foods in their months as
they ate them.

They talked abont adventnres they had had.

“Do yon remember the time we went down to visit
Smnggler’s Pond, and the cave hsh were sparkling
with biolnminescence?”

“Yes, I do. It is said that that only happens once in
a long while. We were very fortnnate to have seen
it.”

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13

“What about the time we were climbing the sheer
rock walls of Mount Eyal, and the rope broke, and I
think it was Chifung who fell, and he fell right off
the rock face, and his ropes disappeared and he
grew wings. And he started to fly, so much to his
surprise. Do you remember that time?”

“How could I forget? We were all moved to tears at
the beauty of it.” As they ate and talked, Midori
joined their company.

“Midori, did you come out here to smell the smell?”
“What smell?”

“We smelled something we couldn’t put into words,
so we went out to hnd the thing that made the
smell, and it led us here. But now the smell is
gone.”

“Oh no, I didn’t come out to smell any smell. I was
just walking in the streets. How fortunate to have
run into you all.”

They hnished up the spread of food, exactly as full
as they needed to be, and then continued to walk.

muted calmness. “All of this,” they said, “exists, as
far as the eye can see.”

They found themselves hnally walking out toward a
desert village, as night fell. They checked into a
desert resort hotel, and lounged around and looked
at all of the desert objects which had been brought
in and mounted on the walls. The carpets in this
hotel were of the hnest quality, and all of our
adventurers greatly enjoyed the feeling of their bare
feet on the floor. The evening meal was of roast
meat and desert vegetables, sage and cactus leaves
among them. Then everyone sat around a hre and
told stories, until dawn came. At this time, the
adventurers decided to part ways. Ngoc, Billingara,
Midori, and the rest from the city decided to
retrace their steps back to where they were from,
and our adventurers from the desert decided to keep
going into the desert world.

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19

of their pants dried out. They walked among the
washes of the desert, and followed one down into a
great alluvial fan. Then they saw in the distance a
hre burning in a steel barrel, and a few people
gathered around it. So they walked toward them,
with the landscape not presenting any sort of
resistance to that particular path.

When they arrived at the hre in the barrel, they
met a group of adventurers who were cooking some
food. They shared a meal and talked about the
weather. All the adventurers soon found themselves
mingled together, telling stories to each other.

Then, after having had their hll of words and food,
they gathered up their backpacks and set off toward
the badlands.

They walked along the beautifully, daringly, eroded
landforms and saw desert sheep leaping across their
path. A rattlesnake rattled at them, and they
looked at it with the utmost respect but without
any fear. They climbed up to the top of one of the
landforms and looked out at the whole picture.

The clouds which brought snow were now only
shading the sun, so their eyes were not as dazzled
by the glare, and instead they saw everything in a

“I’m not tired,” said Juan Carlos, “But I think it
would be good to rest inside this museum.”

The admission to the museum was free, and there
were people who had set up places to rest inside it,
canopies and beds. The museum was dim and cool,
with a high ceiling and a stone floor. There were
exhibits everywhere. Our adventurers looked
around at the artifacts, for hours on end. Finally
they realized that it was becoming dark outside,
but they were so engrossed in the exhibits that they
decided to keep looking. The lights of the museum
were coming on and it was certainly possible to
keep looking. Finally they thought to go outside, to
go back to where they usually stayed, each to their
own home, but as they approached the entrance of
the museum, got out into the atrium that was
ordinarily so full of sunlight, they could see through
its great glass windows a wonderful and awful
scene. The wolves were in the streets! They
padded through with lethal purpose, only stopping
to howl at the moon. The wolves had somewhere
they had come from, and there was somewhere they
were going. Someone was out among them, was
surprised, and turned into a bat and flew away.

The wolves kept coming, their silvery river rapids
flowing, and then they were gone. But as they ran.

18

15

there began the falling of snow, and by the time
they were gone, the snow was falling far too thickly
for anyone to dare leave the mnsenm. So everyone
gathered in the main room, and the docents cleared
away the central exhibit, and set np stones to make
a hre pit, and high above, in the dome of the
ceiling, the skylight was lifted, and the docents
bronght in the wood from old benches replaced by
new, and piles and piles of old papers - not
priceless mannscripts, bnt obsolete docnmentation
from the beantifnlly ever-changing Regnlations of
Mnsenms - and in the old stone bnilding which was
sinking into coldness, they started a great hre to
warm the people who were going to wait ont the
blizzard in the great mnsenm.

The people there told stories and played card games
with decks of cards, which the docents had taken off
the racks of their own gift shop and had made a gift
to everyone. Onr adventnrers became acqnainted
with two others, Eamon and Nigel, and they made
a merry and gratefnl party. They spoke of the
depths of history, as revealed by the exhibits in the
mnsenm. And they spoke abont what they wonld
do when the blizzard was lifted. It was said that
there was a river that froze when it was cold.
Perhaps they conld go ont on that river and go

across it to the other side, which was ordinarily not
easy to get to. What wonld be in that land? They
wondered.

As night progressed, the snow stopped falling, and
eventnally light retnrned to the sky. Onr
adventnrers: Billingara, Jnan Carlos, Ngoc, Midori,
Nigel, and Eamon; walked ont into the invigorating
cold, and walked throngh the powdery snow, in the
direction of the edge of the city, and from thence
ont into the conntryside. Everything looked as it
shonld, covered in a foot of snow. Their feet
became cold and they loved it. They made it ont
to the edge of the river, and overnight, it had frozen
over. They walked across and fonnd themselves in
conntryside that looked mnch like what they had
known. Bnt after walking a few miles, they fonnd
themselves in hills with tall pine trees and broad
oak trees, and then increasingly pine and cedar
trees, all of them covered in snow. They continned
to climb the hills, nntil they fonnd themselves in
foothills. Then they crossed a saddle and fonnd
themselves descending into a warmer, drier place,
and then into a desert.

In the desert, the air was a little warm, and
noticeably dry. Their feet warmed np and the legs

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